Perl appeals to me in much the same way that Kant's moral philosophy appeals to me. It is incumbent upon the coder (or moral agent) to generate the norms by which the code (or behavior) is to be judged, and moreover the individual is solely responsible for adhering to those norms in the absence of an external force (an anal compiler or the police).
I don't love Perl simply because of how few constraints it forces upon the programmer, but because this freedom affords the programmer the opportunity to be self-governing. While you can produce "write-only" Perl by coding inconsistently, the real intellectual satisfaction comes from defining norms that will characterize your code, and then freely acting in accordance with them.
